The present invention relates generally to high voltage DC power supplies. More particularly, the present invention relates to a high voltage DC power supply for use in high energy physics applications such as with multiwire proportional chambers. The present invention provides an improved modular power supply for such high energy physics applications.
Multiwire proportional chambers are used in the field of high energy physics research to detect the position of charged, high energy particles such as protons and electrons. Typically, such charged particles, after having been accelerated to great speed by an accelerator, for example, are directed into a chamber. The chamber has a large number of fine wires passing through it, such wires having a high voltage provided by a suitable power supply. When a charged particle passes nearby a wire, it draws current from the power supply. The current drawn in this manner is measured and is used to detect the position of the particle.
Each particle detection chamber may require several power supplies, and quite often, a single high energy physics experiment may require the use of a large number of chambers and associated multiple power supplies. For this reason, the size and the cost of each power supply become important considerations. Attempts have been made to minimize the size of high voltage DC power supplies by densely packing the components of the power supply. The result of this dense packing has been that the high voltage components have a tendency to arc across the small distances between the densely packed components, thereby compromising their operability and in some cases destroying such components. Encapsulating the entire power supply in a potting compound solved the arcing problem, but components of such an encapsulated power supply, if malfunctioning, cannot be accessed for repair, and the entire power supply must be discarded. Other efforts to minimize size and cost by reducing the total number of components have resulted in a sacrifice of performance.